Time in the Work of Pierre Bayard

Abstract

The following article offers an interpretation of Pierre Bayard’s anachronistic criticism in order to look into the relationship between time and literature, and to problematize the way in which we understand literary history. To that end, we will analyze the deconstructionist strategies deployed by the French critic (such as irony and paradox) which lead to notions such as anticipatory plagiarism. This will drive us to a comparison with other manners of thinking literary history, including those we find in Harold Bloom’s and Hans-Robert Jauss’s works. Finally, this article will try to lay the foundation of the hypothesis according to which the questioning of literary history leads to a reading theory